We look at the entire evolutionary system, all these additions to the brain structure, neural structure and different heart conditions that we find in evolutionary history overcoming the limitation and constraints of the previous system. So, here is simply the discovery of overcoming the limitation and constraints of an ordinary cultural structure. The young person around 21 to 23 is wide open for that except of course they’re driven by fear to go near that perimeter, driven by fear, and fear either of death or cultural censure, punishment, etc., etc.  And these are very, very powerful. To have the whole culture certainly turn and condemn you is mad, there’s a powerful goad to pay attention to what they’re saying. 

And certainly un-conflicted behavior opens up a realm of possibility that we are ordinarily closed too.  The only problem is following through on that. One’s alienation also becomes a very rear factor.  You can’t ever again buy into the cultural game. But then, it leaves you with no place to lay your head, which is also of course there in my hero’s comments a couple of millennia ago. There’s no resting place for it. You’re then in a fluid state, which strangely enough will alienate other people because it’s a threat to their stable state which culture offers them. I finally had developed a great contempt for any kind of stable state because I saw its crippling capacity. That’s when my brother said to me that basically I was a criminal because any rule, regulation, law or anything else to me was just a red flag to break through it at risk of self over and over.  But through that I found that I could do things that were according to the scientific cultural patterns totally impossible.  But I couldn’t sustain it because of fear.  My fear finally dissipated that capacity.

But that is really the discovery that fire does not have to burn and the other is that gravity doesn’t have to hold. Now lots of other people have found the same thing, the Tibetans and so on and so forth, Indian Yogis and so on who levitate, these are real events. We say no, they are imaginations but they’re real events. And then it goes on. Once this business of throwing yourself away and no longer caring, it’s a terrible reckless state and I don’t know that it’s available except at that critical point around 21, 22, 23 when, according to the new research, the pre-frontal cortex has completed its new structuring along with the cerebellum and the great connecting links between them. The cerebellum being connected with all sorts of things that are quite mysterious still in brain research. And so that’s all, just completing itself at that period. And like the little toddler rushing out to interact with the world, it offers one all sorts of breaks with the ordinary common domain.

Drugs no doubt can bring about what we might say a virtual form of this which are extremely limited because they’re not volitional. The power of throwing yourself away is when it’s purely volitional.  I do it of my own volition, my own willingness to take that gamble, to take that chance to jump off a cliff without a parachute. You don’t get that with the drug experience. A guy might try to jump off the cliff without a parachute and of course that’s curtains, but the real McCoy is simply what is opening for us in this exploration of the higher worlds, as Rudolph Steiner said, in which we’re simply moving beyond limitation and constraint. 

So we look at the entire evolutionary system, all these additions to the brain structure, neural structure and different heart conditions that we find in evolutionary history overcoming the limitation and constraints of the previous system. So, here is simply the discovery of overcoming the limitation and constraints of an ordinary cultural structure. The young person around 21 to 23 is wide open for that except of course they’re driven by fear to go near that perimeter, driven by fear, and fear either of death or cultural censure, punishment, etc., etc.  And these are very, very powerful. To have the whole culture certainly turn and condemn you is mad, there’s a powerful goad to pay attention to what they’re saying. 

So my protest from the time I was about 7 on was the effects of culture and what was happening.  Sending me to school at 7, in which I could no longer spend on dawn at Dorchester Hill and my feeling of terrible of violation.  Everything about me was violated by this school experience.  And my rage, I would go into extreme rages about it saying “I own myself”, “I own myself,” and my brothers and sisters and all of them were laughing like you don’t own anything. I remember very clearly my brother in high school who was a lot older than myself, nine years older, saying “you don’t own yourself, the state owns you,” and I didn’t even know what he meant by that at 7 but of course I found out later, oh boy, that that’s the case. 

So that railing against that limitation and constraint and forcing me into a school desk at the very heart of my great experience of that world out there, talking to the plants and the animals, all that stuff, and all that began to dissipate. So then the next stages of course in adolescence and the feeling of being outraged and violated on every level by the same cultural constraint and beginning to realize that everything in me was trying to move beyond that cultural limitation and constraint. And then finally at 22 I had this experience of discovering that if I threw myself away and people can’t believe that but this came about from a lot of personal stuff I don’t need to go in to, but I was really, in a manner of speaking, suicidal. But I was expressing it not through direct suicide but by simply not caring. Do with me as you please I would say in effect. I could give less than a darn about it. But my great protest has been I know, I know full well as I sit here right now, that we have huge areas of potential that are closed off in order to modify our behavior to make us conform to a predictable controllable set of patterns that make us apparently safe to the world out there, but actually as Maria Montessori would say our own greatest enemy you see.